Wednesday, July 08, 2009

Google Gets Out The Shovels

Google announced yesterday that they're going to bury Microsoft by building their own operating system. Well, they didn't exactly yank off their shoe and say the, "We will bury you" line, but everybody knows what they mean.

It will be a marriage of 2 of my favorite products from the open source revolution: Google's Chrome browser (an enlarged version thereof) and Linux. In a perfect world Linux should have overthrown Microsoft when they came out with that bloated monstrosity Vista, but sometimes it's hard for underfunded, disorganized rebels to get any traction. With Google as their leader though they may at long last get their day in the sun (though others hold a contrary view).

And Chrome is a great browser, even though it still won't let you dynamically re-size photos in posts on Google's own Blogger service (Hint! Hint!). I always thought the way it handles downloads was klunky too. But overall it does what I want and goes where I want to go, much faster and more simply than the other browsers. Google, of course, wants people to have all their programs on the Web, so to them an operating system that's really a super-browser makes sense.

When they have it ready I'd be more than happy to put Google's OS on one of our computers. Based on all my other experience with Google projects, I'll probably be mostly pleased with it.

I just have one question though: What are we supposed to do when we're not able to connect to the Web? There are still large swatches of the world where WiFi doesn't exist -- my employer's parking lot in downtown Houston, for instance.